DEVOPSdigest

Cloudflare announced Hyperdrive to make every local database global. Now developers can easily build globally distributed applications on Cloudflare Workers, the serverless developer platform used by over one million developers, without being constrained by their existing infrastructure.

Hyperdrive makes accessing data from across the globe faster and more efficient, no matter where the data or end-users are.

Most organizations using legacy cloud providers typically have databases hosted in a single region that cannot be easily replicated or migrated elsewhere. Transferring these databases to new locations close to users comes with business disruption tradeoffs—it is costly and time intensive to move databases while ensuring business-as-usual. And yet, when building on modern distributed cloud platforms, including Cloudflare Workers, developers frequently need to connect back to these existing databases around the world. Connecting to faraway databases results in a slower experience for their users, and makes it challenging for teams to expand beyond a single legacy cloud region.

With Hyperdrive, developers can build globally distributed applications on Cloudflare Workers that are not held back by their existing regional database infrastructure. Hyperdrive automatically caches the most popular queries within Cloudflare’s network, allowing developers to serve responses within a few milliseconds, not hundreds – as if the database was located close to the end user. An ecommerce site with a database in New York and customers in Europe can now use Hyperdrive and the Cloudflare network to make that database function as if it is in Europe, right next to those customers, for a much faster turnaround time and more responsive end-user experience.

“With Cloudflare, developers never need to decide where their data should live before they’ve written a line of code; we consider everything built on us to be one region: Earth. Today, we’re able to give organizations a faster, more connected experience to ensure no matter where your existing data lives, it benefits from the speed and performance of Cloudflare’s network,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder, Cloudflare. “Hyperdrive represents the best part of a connectivity cloud, it expands the types of apps that can be built on Cloudflare, and opens the door for developers that previously felt locked into their databases.”

Cloudflare Workers is the only global serverless provider with this built into the application development platform. Hyperdrive works with the existing database tools developers use today and:

- Enables database connection pooling to Workers, turning what can be half a second to set up a database connection on every request into near-zero when re-used.

- Caches the most popular queries to a database, which typically represent 80-90% of the queries issued by user-facing web applications. Caching both dramatically improves the performance of full-stack applications, and subsequently reduces database load and cost.

- Supports a wide range of the most popular database providers, including those hosted on AWS, Google Cloud, Neon and Timescale, as well as Postgres-compatible databases like CockroachDB and Materialize.

Cloudflare Workers is part of Cloudflare’s global connectivity cloud—a platform that enables any organization to easily, securely, and reliably connect all of its people, apps, servers, networks, and other clouds, everywhere.